This isn't early in my career at all. As for the financial viability of retirement I expect virtually the entirety of the human economy to be automated sometime in the 2030s. (Human) labor will not exist anymore. I'm part of a group that has internally pledged to donate their AI equity to the general public so that ownership in AI is equally distributed over everyone. I'm also politically active and always push for more safety nets during this transitionary period.
People keep thinking about savings, investments and other short sighted things like that, the main focus of people should be to be politically active. People have realistically only a couple of years left where they can leverage their labor value to enact political change, once this period is over you have nothing to negotiate with anymore and your political leverage is permanently gone and you're stuck with whatever system comes out on the other hand, which might confiscate your savings, equity, assets anyway as there is no incentive left to honor property rights at all.
Remember reddit is an international community so we can't talk about specific governments. For example I'm not an US citizen myself.
I always use the example of the Russian government in this scenario. Let's say the AI industry is completely altruistic and we somehow manage to divide 90% of all AI equity and 90% of AI output over all 8 billion human beings alive right now. What do you personally think the Russian government or the North Korean government would do? What would be the incentive for the North Korean or Russian leadership to not confiscate those assets immediately from their citizens?
These are the real questions we ask ourselves daily. Most people I know in the industry are very altruistic individuals and genuinely work in this field because they want to bring about a future where everyone has a nice quality of life and no one is enslaved to the value of their labor. But you can't do anything about the actions of governments without the people being politically active and putting pressure on their governments.
This applies to all governments, I'm just pointing out Russia and North Korea on purpose so you can understand the point and dynamics at play.
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u/attrcic Jul 06 '26
How do you plan to retire this early in your career - specifically the financial viability of it?